Republican U.S. Senate candidate Tom Campbell said Monday he would have voted to confirm one of President Barack Obama’s U.S. Supreme Court nominees but not the other.

The reason, he said, was experience.

That’s why he would have backed Justice Sonia Sotomayor, but would vote against Solicitor General Elena Kagan, whom Obama nominated last week to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens.

“Justice Sotomayor had 20 years of experience” as a judge, Campbell said at a meeting with about a dozen young professionals, mostly recent law-school graduates, in the conference room of a Point Loma law office. “Yes, she is more liberal than I am, but she’s not out of the mainstream of reasonable discourse. She was qualified. Solicitor General Kagan has never tried a case, never argued a case before she became solicitor general 13 months ago.

“The president has nominated somebody without sufficient experience. As to her judicial philosophy, we’ll all learn something from the hearings. But that’s a separate question from whether you have experience.”

Campbell, a former Stanford University law professor, said he does not necessarily consider judicial experience to be a prerequisite for appointment to the Supreme Court.

“A good example of a fine justice is Lewis Powell,” he said. “Justice Lewis Powell had never been a judge, but he was president of the American Bar Association and a distinguished attorney from Virginia with many, many years’ experience.”

Campbell, a former congressman, state senator and state finance director, said he could conceive of voting against a judicial nominee that he considered far outside the ideological mainstream, but that ideology would not be his foremost consideration.

Among Campbell’s opponents for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in the June 8 primary election, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina has not taken a definitive position on either nomination and Assemblyman Chuck DeVore condemned both.

“He would not vote to confirm Kagan, but he would not have voted for Sotomayor, either,” DeVore communications director Joshua Trevino said.

“While I will reserve judgment as to whether or not I will support Ms. Kagan’s confirmation to the Supreme Court until the public vetting and confirmation process has been completed, I do find some of the available information about her past record troubling,” she said of Kagan, a former Harvard Law School dean.

Specifically, she criticized Kagan for attempting to keep military recruiters off campus; Kagan said she did so because the military discriminated against gays.

Fiorina has said she probably would have voted for Sotomayor, who also had served as a New York prosecutor.

Fiorina stressed she was being treated for breast cancer at the time and didn’t study Sotomayor’s record in detail.